


ink, blood, and secrets

by cinderrain



Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Demons, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-27
Updated: 2018-03-27
Packaged: 2019-04-13 19:00:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14118837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cinderrain/pseuds/cinderrain
Summary: “I still don’t think this is a good idea.”“Allen, don’t be a wimp. You agreed to this, remember?” Lenalee finishes off the last flourishes on the circle drawn in her brother’s attic. It’s painted on the ground in ink, with minimal amounts of blood mixed in. “We’ll be careful.”





	ink, blood, and secrets

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [LaviYuu Week 2018.](https://laviyuu-week.tumblr.com)  
> Prompt: Fog | Vague, Out Of Reach, Mystery, Eerie, Secrets

“I still don’t think this is a good idea.”

“Allen, don’t be a wimp. You agreed to this, remember?” Lenalee finishes off the last flourishes on the circle drawn in her brother’s attic. It’s painted on the ground in ink, with minimal amounts of blood mixed in. “We’ll be careful.”

“I just think it’s going overboard a little!” Allen protests, but he still keeps helping Kanda move the furniture to the sides of the room. “The debt collectors yesterday didn’t even manage to hit me.”

“This time!” Lenalee points out, voice rising in frustration. “What about next time? Just because you dodged them this time doesn’t mean that Cross’s debts are settled! We still need to find him.”

“And summoning a demon is the best way to do it?” Allen sounds doubtful. He’s been dragging his feet this entire time, and Kanda’s tired of it. 

Before he can snap at Allen, though, Lenalee goes on. “Komui summoned a Bookman-class demon perfectly safely. I was even there for some of it! It was just an old man who tells you what you want to know for a couple bits of knowledge that no one else knows.”

“So like, secrets. We’re giving our deepest secrets to this thing, and we don’t even know what it could do with them!”

“It wouldn’t want to do anything with them except trade them, sometime down the road, in exchange for more information.” Lenalee huffs. “No backing out now, Allen. Your blood’s already in the circle.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Allen mumbles. “You’re doing this for  _ me  _ anyway.”

Kanda stacks the last chair upside-down on the table and joins them at the desk. It’s piled high with books from the university’s library, detailing everything they could find on this demon. It’s not the same one as the one Komui summoned, which is worrying, but there are records of the last contract somebody made. 

“These are detailed enough to get us through. We already decided to do it, beansprout, shut the fuck up with your whining.” He flips through the records one last time: May 3, 1715. Doug, a scholar, summons “Deak” during a total solar eclipse. 

September 4th of the same year: the contract is broken off early. 

They’ve puzzled over that page, the three of them, for the entire week leading up to this. There are only three conclusions: Doug died of unrelated causes; Doug chickened out and broke the contract, absorbing the collateral damage; or “Deak” found a loophole and killed him. 

It’ll be fine. They’re not summoning this thing for long enough to risk that happening, anyway. Probably. 

 

The circle is the standard neutral one, with a few additions to mark time. They know it’s been roughly three hundred years since the last summoning, and they know this is the 99th day of the year. Lenalee’s hoping that might give them some more power; Kanda’s hoping this whole thing doesn’t backfire and explode on them. Allen complains that he’s hungry. 

They each have half-sheets of blue-lined paper, where they scribbled on in ballpoint pen a secret from each of them. Kanda wrote that he misses Alma, only because they’re burning these immediately. 

The fire at the centre of the circle eats their sheets of paper faster than it should, and the lines of ink and blood light up gold. For a second they glow too bright to look directly at, and when Kanda blinks his eyes open again the demon’s there. 

“Holy shit it worked,” Allen hisses from behind him. 

The thing floating there looks washed-out, grey and misty. It’s obvious at a glance that this demon isn’t made for combat: its claws are tiny, the horns sweep backwards like a rabbit’s ears -- round at the tips, and it’s mostly made of smoke. There are occasional flares of red near its head, claws, and heart, and a constant white glow flickering under the rest of its barely-corporeal form. 

It grins. Both eyes glow yellow, but its right eye is especially fucked up, a curling black mark like some sort of script set into and around it. Its teeth are sharp. 

“What’s your question?”

Lenalee steps up, coughs into her fist. “Where is Cross Marian?”

“I don't have that information stored right now. I can find it out.”

“Uh, yes. Do that.” Lenalee’s been caught off-guard. This wasn’t in their script. 

“Cool. Great.” It looks like it’s laughing at them. “See you when I do, then.” And it steps out of the circle. 

“Wait!” Allen starts to panic. “Wait, stay there,  _ Deak _ .” He’s putting all the proper force behind the demon’s name, and by all rights it should work, but --

It laughs again. “Not my name anymore, yeah? Better luck next time, though. Do a little more research, maybe.” 

The demon disappears.

“Fuck,” Kanda says, very quietly but with feeling. 

 

So it’s a few days after the Accident, and they found their mistake (Bookman-class demons can change their names, at a cost to their personal identity, under certain circumstances), and now all Kanda wants to do is forget about the fact that they unleashed a demon on the world and didn’t even get what they wanted from it. 

Someone runs into him as he’s leaving class, and he almost drops his notebooks. “Watch where you’re fucking going,” he snaps. 

Red hair, green eye. Bright smile. Eyepatch. It’s over the right eye, and Kanda’s just angry to be reminded of their mistake again. “Hey, sorry man. The name’s Lavi.” He holds out a hand. “Nice to meet you!”

What gave this guy the impression that introductions were in order? “Kanda,” he answers cautiously, and ignores the hand. That one eye is looking at him with more interest than even two eyes would warrant. 

“Oh shit, Yuu Kanda?” 

Kanda twitches. How the fuck --?

“I’m your new roommate!” The grin gets even wider, somehow, and Kanda hates it. He hates everything. “What are the odds, hey?”

 

Kanda fully intends to just ignore his roommate, like he had planned on doing anyway, but somehow the idiot is impossible to shake. He’s in his history class. He’s in his magical crimes class. He’s home when Kanda’s home, and Kanda has never told him his schedule but he feels like this is intentional somehow anyway. 

He learns, against his will, that Lavi is obnoxiously earnest about his studies. His fake smile gets a little more real every time he comes across something that he didn’t know before. He’s never taken off the eyepatch, not where Kanda can see. Not even when he’s asleep, the one or two times Kanda walked in on him taking a nap. He never goes to bed before Kanda does, but he’s always up earlier than him. 

Lavi chatters at him constantly. To his horror, Kanda notices himself starting to snipe back. And not even in a particularly hostile way. Somewhere along the line he tripped, and insult turned to banter, and now even Allen and Lenalee see Lavi as a friend by proxy. 

In between it all, the three of them are still looking for the demon they lost. 

Lavi kisses him, a few months into the school year. 

Kanda maybe kisses back. 

Things don’t change much after that, except that they do. Sometimes Lavi will sneak into Kanda’s bed, if neither of them have papers to write, and a few more months pass before Kanda starts telling him things for the sake of filling the air between them. Bits and pieces, but Lavi has a talent of teasing more out of him, and 3 am chats become a habit. 

And then one night the eyepatch slips. 

The string might have been loose, or else Kanda jostled it turning over in bed, but when he glances over again Lavi’s lying there with a stricken look on his face and his right eye uncovered. His right eye that’s golden, with curling black script curved around it like a tattoo. 

Kanda can’t believe he’s been so stupid. 

Lavi watches him back up, press against the wall, and he has no right to look hurt. Kanda’s the one who’s feeling betrayed right now. 

“Fuck. Wait, Yuu--”

“Don’t call me that.”

Lavi reaches out, touches Kanda’s hand, and before he can pull away magic slams into him, the feeling of power and a weight behind “Lavi”. The number forty-nine. Kanda blinks, breathes through it, and looks back up to see Lavi with both eyes squeezed shut. Waiting. 

For what? Kanda realizes, slowly, what he’s just been given. It’s his name. He could kill Lavi in an instant -- he could do worse -- he doesn’t want this. “No, no. How do I give this back?”

“I. What?” Lavi opens his eyes. “You can -- I got all that information from you for  _ free _ , Yuu. You can make it so I can’t tell anyone.”

“You can still decide whether or not to, right? No one can make you tell them.”

“Yeah, but I --”

“Then fuck that. You’ve hung around long enough,” and here Lavi looks guilty, “you should’ve encountered this little human concept called trust by now.”

That one leaves Lavi speechless. 

“I don’t want this. Take it away from me again, make me forget it.”

“That’s not how knowledge magic works, Yuu.” Lavi’s relieved, Kanda can tell, but tired, too. “I would know, that’s basically what I am.” He tries a little smile, and it looks wrong on him. 

“No, fuck that too.” Kanda’s hands curl into fists, but he keeps them at his sides. “I’m dating a person, not an idea.” 

Lavi stares. Eventually, he mutters, “I might like that.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Yuu, go to sleep. We’ll sort out this name thing in the morning.”

Kanda listens, but he should have known better. 

 

Lavi’s gone the next morning, and Kanda’s almost surprised. He goes to classes, like usual, and people ask about Lavi’s absence. At least he didn’t pull something that made everyone else forget he ever went to school here. 

But, if Lavi’s to be believed, forgetting isn’t in his domain. 

Three days pass like this, Kanda in limbo, not sure whether to confess to Allen and Lenalee that  for the past few  _ months  _ he’s been dating the demon they misplaced. 

On the morning of the fourth day, Kanda wakes up to his phone ringing. It’s Allen. 

“Kanda, Kanda, holy fuck.”

“What.”

“Someone left a note? Under my door? With coordinates to Cross’s location -- tell Lenalee I’m taking class off today, I’m going to go find the bastard -- who the hell?”

_ I might have an idea _ , Kanda thinks. “Huh,” he says instead. 

 

It turns out Lenalee agrees. “It must have been the demon!” She jumps once, too excited to contain it. “Those were the only terms we managed to get through, so it had to fulfill the conditions eventually. The loophole let it hide out for as long as it wanted, though.”

“I wonder what made it change its mind?” Allen wonders, from the phone. He’s on speaker, still on the way to surprise Cross. 

Kanda stays quiet. 

 

It takes him another day to figure it out, and he only manages it because he finally decides to sit Allen and Lenalee down and tell them everything. 

“Oh my god.” Lenalee’s eyes are wide. “Lavi? Really.”

Allen shakes his head, slow disbelief. “Why did he leave?” 

“We’re about to find out.” 

 

The summoning goes off without a hitch, this time, made all the easier that they have such a recent name to use. Lavi shows up in his human form, minus eyepatch, and Kanda hands it over without a word. 

“Thanks, Yuu,” and they both know it’s for more than just hanging onto his clothes for him. “I fixed the name thing! I knew you weren’t going to let it go, so --”

“How?” Kanda doesn’t want to dwell on this long enough that Lenalee might figure out what Lavi means (that the guilt would kill Kanda, that much power). 

“Changed it.” Lavi looks so smug that Kanda’s feeling his early-days violent urges start to rise again. “From Lavi-the-49th to Lavi-the-student. I mean. If you’re going to let me camp out here longer this time?”

Kanda hates how uncertainty looks on Lavi. It doesn’t suit him. “Why the fuck else would we go to the trouble of summoning you? Like, oh, we’re morons, we lost Cross again literally a week after you found him for us.”

Lavi laughs, and he sounds a little more like himself. “Good. I never finished learning Swedish.” 

**Author's Note:**

> I had to show so much restraint not to write "And it all goes to hell" somewhere in there.   
> I hope you liked it!


End file.
